| Interview: Lead Pursuit's Falcon 4: Allied
Force
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Q. What kind of documentation
will be shipping with the game? PDF, paper or online?
A. There will be a 110-page
printed manual, as mentioned before, plus a PDF manual for
the hardcore enthusiast.
Q. Will
it be a total rewrite of the F4 manual or will it incorporate
sections of the SP3 / 4 manuals or other later modifications?
A. The printed manual is very
much redone for new players to quickly appreciate the most
important features of the F-16.
Q. Any thoughts to an extended
paper manual for a supplemental price such as the original
Falcon 4 had?
A. We are seriously considering
it, yes. It depends very much on demand though. We would love
to produce a highly detailed manual in a metal-bound folder
but that is likely to be expensive for the consumer. If the
demand is there, and people are happy to pay a little bit
more for it, then we're game on (I'd buy it anyway!)
Q. Will data edits be permitted
under the new EULA?
A. An announcement will be
made soon.
Q. Is 100% of the development
the result of members of the F4:AF team or are additional
skins, terrains, and cockpits being imported from the modding
community?
A. They're the work of Lead
Pursuit.
Q. Has there been major tweaks
to the campaign AI?
A. The campaign engine has
undergone extensive changes and it hasn't been an easy task!
The campaign of course is part of a Virtual Universe. It is
in many ways a database that tracks tens of thousands of entities
every tenth of a second. This Virtual Universe controls everything
that exists in the Falcon world, be it an F-16 jet, an enemy
MiG-29, a surface to air missile site, even the status of
a bridge that might have been damaged. Much more detail again
is contained on our web site in our campaign development notes.
Q. Will users be able to manipulate
the ground campaign progress manually or will the campaign
engine handle that automatically?
A. Yes, for example, they can
manually task ground engineer units to repair a bridge or
order a unit to attack other troublesome enemy units.
Q. In previous versions of F4,
if a friendly airbases runways were damaged, the runways remained
damaged for the remainder of the campaign despite being fixed;
has this been corrected?
A. Yes, that has been fixed.
Q. What kind of multiplayer enhancements
and stability will be a part of F4:AF? Will campaign servers
be implemented?
A. Falcon
and multiplayer has been a difficult union in the past because
so much is happening in the game. The multiplayer engine has
to keep track of what happens across the entire network, prioritize
the most important messages, such as positional updates of
aircraft, while maintaining a grip on bandwidth. Significant
resources have been targeted at the multiplayer engine and
there has been a big improvement.
We hope
online squads will enjoy campaign flights with their squad
as much as their specially-constructed TE missions. We'd never
say there will not be oddities in Internet campaign flights
with multiple clients, but they have been significantly reduced.
Given enough CPU power and enough bandwidth, multiplayer in
Falcon is a dream. Our recent MP flights while doing final
testing have been a blast.
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